Spelling
The Students in Room 12 Are Working to Be Superstar Spellers!!
In researching best practices in spelling instruction, it quickly became apparent to me that in order to create the maximum growth in a child’s spelling level, there is a great need for spelling instruction centered around his/her individual spelling stage. This instruction should help a child understand and apply spelling rules and not just focus on memorization of a list. For this reason, I will conduct detailed spelling assessments at the beginning of the year to determine your child’s spelling stage. I will then use this information to direct my instruction.
Children will participate in direct spelling instruction every Monday. This lesson will focus on a spelling rule, sound, or on a common “chunk” of letters. The students will also have regular exposure to sight words (red words) within the spelling lesson format. These lessons are very detailed and will help the children learn rules that they need in order to spell words correctly in their writing. This spelling lesson will be a grade appropriate lesson that will benefit everyone in the class and will therefore be conducted in a whole group setting. They will not get their weekly spelling words on Mondays and their words will not necessarily come from this lesson.
The spelling instruction your child will receive will directly relate to reading. It's amazing how connected the two are. Because of this, they will get spelling reinforcement during small group and one-on-on reading times.
Test formats will be different. Some will be dictated lists. Others will be a format in which the students have to write the words in context. Once the second grading period begins, students may also have transfer words appearing on their tests. Transfer words are words that are not on the original list, but follow the rule (which is the most important part) and should therefore be able to be spelled without memorization. For example, a student may have a list that focuses on "magic e" and during the test they may be asked to spell "bike" which is not on their list. If they know the "magic e" rule, they will be able to "transfer" it to spell the word "bike" correctly.